Birthday boy

Today is the third birthday of mon filleul ainé, which translates literally as my elder godson but accurately as one of the two boys who is almost mine. Why hasn't our language come up with a word for this? G is the son of my dear friend. To refer to him, though, as my friend's son misses the intimacy of our relationship. He is, quite simply, one of my own, a part of my family and my heart. When he saw me last month for the first time since August, he was in his grandpa's arms. And he reached for me.

I had to put him down after a minute, though, because he's one of the tallest and strongest and biggest and squirmiest three year olds you'll ever come across. G runs a life full tilt. He's spent the balance of his short life in France, and that has meant that we've been lucky to have lots of time together. So here, in honor of his birthday, are my favorite G in France stories.

When G and his mother visited us at La Bastiole for the first time, we mothers went with him down to the piscine. (Every new house in our région is required by law to have a pool; the water is handy for the pompiers in the event of forest fires.) We set G to wander around on the deck, and his mum and I sat at the corner of the pool and dangled our feet in the water while we talked. G walked up and down and around and around, and we cautioned him to stay away from the water's edge. He walked around singing his tuneless toddler song and we talked some more. Then he walked by us and fell in the water. Right between us. We both plunged our hands in, grabbed a body part, and fished him out. Then we laughed: two of us, fully grown, responsible, respectable, and one waterlogged 20 month old.

A few months later, he visited us again with his mother, this time for a week. It was the nadir of his life thus far. He was on the edge of language and profoundly frustrated at not being able to communicate the subtleties of his needs: so he did a fair amount of yelling. That he was sick--one of those full-on snotty colds that only small children get--made matters worse. His mother and I spent the week trying to find something to make him happy, or, if not happy (we gave that up pretty fast), at least not screaming miserable. One morning towards the end of the week we took him to the park. The setting for this park is beautiful: it's between a country lane and a stream, with an old mill on one side and a thousand year old church on the other. Birds were singing, the stream was burbling, and G stood in the middle of the playground, in the shadow of the pirate ship playset, howling, Mommy, No! at the top of his small but powerful lungs. We tried to console him--hugs, the slide, the climbing bars, applesauce for snack, more hugs--and, when he was inconsolable, we retreated to our bench and ate the applesauce ourselves.

A few months, again, and the language has come along and allayed some of his frustration. I am visiting in Paris, and when I come in the door of his apartment, G attaches himself to my leg. We read stories together. He introduces me to his stuffed animals and to his matchbox cars, and I give him his bath and put him to bed. When I think he has fallen asleep and get up to leave his room, he stirs, and says, from that place next door to sleep, Stay with me. I do.

Another visit to the south, and our families have gone for a walk. G and one of my girls fall behind the rest of us. When we turn to look back at them, G has found a walking stick twice as tall as he is, and my daughter is walking beside him, slowing her steps to match his and trying, with partial success, to avoid getting hit by the stick.

And then it is our last visit with G's family in Paris, before they return Stateside. It is our girls' birthday. We have a family birthday dinner all together, and G gets to stay up late. We've finished the meal and the beautiful cake, and C is teaching G how to make scarey faces. C drops his jaw down, rolls up his eyes, sticks out his tongue, and raises his arms over his head. G is suspicious until C returns to normal. Then he laughs. C makes the face again, and G copies him. They waggle their heads at each other, making lurid monster sounds, until G laughs so hard that he falls over.

One more visit to our house, and then they will be gone. G is sitting on his father's shoulders and we are in the lane behind our house. I pick blackberries and give them to him and he fills his mouth, his tongue and lips purple, tshirt, cheeks, father's head--a riot of blackberry juice.

And so, happy birthday, my boy. Bon anniversaire. I can hardly wait to see what you will do next.

Shalom, Obama

I stopped by our bakery the day we came home from our trip. M. le boulanger came out from behind the counter to wish me bonne année et bonne santé with a kiss on both cheeks. Vous avez passé des bonnes fêtes aux Etats-Unis? he asked. Vous les avez célébré avec Obama?

But of course, I said. We went to Hawaii and celebrated with him there.

Gilbert--I'll tell you his name; we've been on first-name basis for a while now, which is not a minor accomplishment--inclined his head conspiratorially. You know, I've changed my mind about Obama.

Gilbert was the only français we knew who had supported McCain. I had extrapolated from that--and from a few conversations about immigration--support for all sorts of political stances, none of them similar to my own. But that's the beauty of a foreign language and culture: we could agree on fresh bread and pastries and leave politics out of it.

He pointed out the window of the shop, towards the newspaper stand. Prominently displayed was a copy of the current Tribune Juive, the monthly magazine of the Jewish community in France. Its headline, under a flattering photo of the president-elect, was Shalom Obama. The baker nodded in that direction.

I bought that magazine, and I read the article. He turned back to me. I'm Jewish, you see.

Really? I was genuinely surprised. The Jewish population of France is small, the Jewish population in our region, microscopic. C is Jewish, too.

You never told me, he said. Now we have to shake hands. You must tell C that although I liked him before, now I like him even better. He came out from behind the counter and shook my hand before continuing: I read the article about Obama, and did you know that most of his advisers are Jewish? In fact, I think that his mind is almost a Jewish mind. He thinks like a Jew.

All I could come up with was: Vous croyez? Do you think so?

Mais si. Bien sûr. So now I am supporting him, with you. Nous sommes tous démocrats. We are all democrats.

And so it came to pass that Gilbert, the only Frenchman we know who would have voted for McCain if he could have, changed his mind. Shalom, Obama, indeed.

Road Food

Colette, C's French teacher and our friend, lives in a village up in the mountains, the last village on my mental map before the mountains edge out everything except ski resorts. She is cheerful and practical and sensible, and one evening a few weeks ago (this is the story she told C), she was driving home and saw, along the roadside, a rabbit that had been hit by a car. She pulled off the road, got out of the car, and went to check the rabbit. It was dead but still warm. So she picked it up and took it home for dinner. Her American husband was, she related in a tone that was fond but a little puzzled, distressed to learn that he was enjoying--in a wine sauce, with raisins and onions--what we in the States call roadkill. Colette confided that the lapin had been a little tough, which she attributes to her having been in such a hurry to make dinner that she didn't hang the carcass in her larder to age.

This is not the first roadkill for dinner story we've heard; in fact, it's the third. There was Violette, whose car collided with a sanglier, which she then put in the trunk and later packaged up for the freezer. Wild boar stew, sausages, and steaks all winter long. And there was Marcelle, the main course of whose Christmas dinner last year was built around venison from a deer that her father had found, likewise, newly dead by the road.

We are told that it is illegal in France to pick up and take home a dead animal that you yourself have hit with a car. (Violette is a fugitive from the law.) It is difficult to resist speculating on how that law came to be required, exactly. Were French people waiting until dusk every day, and then getting behind the wheel and going out to aim at animals as they crossed the road? Were people hitting deer and wild boars and rabbits and, it's France, god knows what else, on purpose? You have to admit that it's easier than going hunting, doesn't require reflective clothing or artillery, and can be done while listening to Johnny Hallyday on the radio. Of course, it's easy to get around the law if you are a two-car family: the first car finds dinner, the second car brings it home.

We dined out on these stories while we were Stateside and our friends and family had reactions that ranged from Aren't the French wonderful wistfulness to But that rabbit could have been diseased! They might all have contracted rabies from eating it! disdain. It was universally inconceivable, regardless of where our audience fell on the reaction spectrum, to have scooped up a rabbit from the side of the road and eaten it for supper.

Then we came home to France and told Colette about the banana pudding that my aunt made for Christmas dinner. She's been making it for decades; here's a recipe similar to the one I think she uses. You will note that the recipe calls for boxed vanilla pudding mix, whipped topping (which advertised itself, last time I checked, as non-dairy), and vanilla wafers. The wafers she uses are called Nilla because they don't actually contain any vanilla, and advertising them as such would be like calling the whipped topping cream. Colette laughed long and hard at the notion of eating such a concoction, and that was even before we mentioned the Velveeta that also figured in a few of our American meals. Is it cheese? she asked. Well, it is, and it isn't. It comes closer to being cheese than whipped topping comes to being cream, but not by much. At all.

It's a conversation about cultural differences. How processed do you need your food to be? How far removed from nature, red in tooth and claw (and fender), and how far removed from the chemistry lab? We've not been offered a dinner of freshly hit meat, and I'm not sure what our response would be if we were; it would probably have a lot to do with whether there was adequate red wine on offer. As for the banana pudding and Velveeta, I have to say, first, that I had always loved both. Okay, not loved. Enjoyed ambivalently once or twice a year may be closer to the truth. Loved eating the food that my family had made for me, loved feeling cared for. Wished, though, once I was grown, that my family loved to make something else, something that had less of a plastic after-taste.

I think part of our relationship with France is rooted there, in that wish that our families--disclaimer: whom we love and would never trade in--were more like the families in Madeleine L'Engle's books, where the parents are both Nobel prize winning physicists who read poetry aloud at the dinner table and teach the children to sing in four-part harmony while they're spending summers hiking in the Andes. And that our country concerned itself less with figuring out how to manufacture a cheese that had a shelf life of a century (and giving it a handgun to fend off any other cheeses), and more with protecting small things, like the local farmers who might make a little extra money making their own cheese and selling their own cows' cream. Or with making sure that people don't just go out and aim their cars at wild animals as an easy way of getting dinner.

If, however, you've got a friend to drive behind you, remember to hang the lapin for a few days before you cook it. It'll be more tender that way.

Shepherd redux

We saw the shepherd again today. It had been a frenetic morning at La Bastiole. Jules is having a stone wall built at the bottom of the garden, and there are trucks and backhoes and piles of sand and cement mixers in the parking, and men to go with all that, men who start arriving for the day at 7.30. Which is when Alice starts sounding the alarm. Then at 8.00 Jules phoned C to discuss with him some of the more arcane points of Paying For Everything in Cash, and, before we really knew what was what, he was at the back door with a list of reasons that the bank should hand over wads of cash to C to pay our--now what would we be paying in cash? and why would Jules interest himself in it? I'll leave that to your imagination. On his heels came Marcelle, our French tutor, ready for her weekly hour and a half with E and G, and alarmingly awake and bright-eyed. Alice barked throughout.

So I finished my tea, checked online to make sure that the clock was at 13 days, and then left the house with the dogs. We walked up the path to the chemin du Moulin and towards the village. Wendy found all the olives that were still semi-whole on the ground, dipping her head to scoop them up in her mouth, and Alice sniffed every tuft of grass. There was quite a bit of snow on the Pic de Courmettes. The wind was blowing, and the clouds were coming down quickly: the mountain was disappearing as we walked.

About halfway along the lane, a man stepped out from between two olive trees and began walking along several yards in front of us. He was shorter than I am by half a head, and had legs much longer than his torso. He looked mismatched, like a child had put two different dolls together. He walked with a wooden stick that reached his shoulder, and wore dark green wellington boots, dark green pants, and several bulky pullovers. No hat or gloves. It took him several paces before he heard us coming behind him--Wendy and Alice's collars jingle a little--because he was singing. Not loudly, but not under his breath, either; not humming. Singing something that I could tell had a tune, although that wasn't what he was singing, exactly. It sounded like the baritone line of a chorale: hum hum hum, a bar to meet the melody, hum hum hum, a little more melody.

When he heard us coming, during a lull in his melody, he turned around and wished me good day, but did not lose his place in the chorale. For whatever reason--and my city self wonders at it--my Crazy Person hackles did not go up. I didn't recognize him, as I do many of the people I meet on our walks, but he seemed so perfectly at ease that I just accepted that he belonged there.

And then I saw the sheep below us, on the upper terrace where the lane bends to go up to the village. They were grazing around the olive trees, butting each other along, doing their sheep thing. When we reached the bend in the lane, the singer turned down a little path towards the herd. He glanced back at me before he did, nodded and even seemed to bow, formally, a little. Then the melody line came back to his part, and he went off singing towards his flock.

In France

When I started graduate school, I heard lots of stories about a fellow Williams alum who had started his history doctorate a few years before I did. Apparently he had arrived on the West Coast and promptly and continually compared everything and everyone to his undergrad experience. At Williams, he would say, professors invited their students over for dinner with their families. At Williams, he would say, the shopkeepers on Spring Street knew the students by name. At Williams, he would say, every season was beautiful and there was never any traffic. At Stanford, my fellow graduate students didn't think a whole lot of my fellow Eph's attachment to our college. After all, Stanford was not without its charms.

We're back from two weeks with our families in the States. I think we saw nearly everyone we meant to see; certainly we saw everyone we had time to see, in the time that we had. We celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah and New Year's with family, extended family, and friends. We ate and talked and walked and then ate some more. Most people we saw we hadn't seen in nearly two years. They asked us about our life here; we said it was a good life. And that was generally the end of the conversation. At least, it felt like that to us. Maybe to everyone else it sounded like we were going on endlessly, obnoxiously, about the baguettes and the views and the sangliers and the weather: In France, we eat fresh bread every day. In France, there are no strip malls. In France, almost all our food is locally grown--but to us, it felt like we said, we're happy there, and then the conversation moved on.

And really, there's no reason it shouldn't have. It would have been boring at best, and boorish at worst, to bless every one with a lecture on Being an American and Living In France in 2007-08, or, France and America: Similarities and Differences. (After all, that's what La Bastiole is for.) What was disconcerting was that our friends and family accepted us back, just as we are, or were, or had been. We stepped back into our American life with barely a ripple, as though we had been away for a few days and not a few years.

That was probably a good thing. The alternative--stepping back in and getting sucked under by the tide, not feeling any connection with the people we care about--certainly holds no appeal. And yet we feel changed by our life here, and uncertain about how we will ever live our life again in America, and whether we want to, and what that means. That feels profound to us. To others on the outside it probably doesn't. The feeling is probably mentioned, and explained, in the penultimate chapter of most books on living abroad. How, though, to go about living through it is something we have to figure out.

Meanwhile, this morning, I look out my kitchen window and think: In France, I look over the olive trees to the sea.

Bonnes fêtes, et à bientôt

Tomorrow morning, well before dawn, C will take me to the airport to begin the three-flight journey to my hometown. He and the girls will follow the next day. The dogs are going to spend the holidays with Madame Puppies (who just got a new puppy; I expect Wendy and Alice to sleep for half of January). I've cleaned off the terraces--put away the porch furniture, tucked the gardening tools into their chest, cut back the geraniums. I've got three more errands to run this afternoon. And, oh, yes, I've got to pack.

We've not been Stateside for well over a year. It's lots of longests: the longest we've ever been abroad continually, the longest we've ever gone without seeing C's family (not the whole time; just the last six months), the longest I've ever gone without staying in my mother's house. As long as it's been for us, it's longer, proportionally, for E and G, a longer stretch out of their shorter lives. E is so excited she can hardly finish a sentence. Myself, I haven't slept through the night in days. I wake up around 4 and listen for the church bells, and run through lists until I doze again. We're looking forward to being with our famille éloignée, of which there is a lot, we hope to have a moment with everyone.

One of the disorienting things about living overseas is that, although you're living, in our case, at least, in a place saturated with history, your own history fades a bit. The places that inhabit your memory are out of sight, and the people who remind you of your past are missing. Of course there's our immediate family, but they are immediate, of the present, now, what's the right verb form for this sentence and do we need buttermilk? There's not a lot that reminds us of our past, and the present demands our full attention.

This week, L's grandmother died. She was of a venerable age and has been failing for a long time. I've been on the phone and in email contact with L more since her grandmother died than in the last six weeks, sorting out travel plans and funeral arrangements. The service will be where L's grandmother lived, in my hometown which is also L's, and, through this trick of fate, C and the girls and I will be able to attend it. I've known L's family since I was the girls' age, even before. Many of the people I'll see at the service that day, and at dinners and on walks and over cups of tea on the other days, will have known me since I was my daughters' age, or before. They'll remember things about me that I've forgotten myself. I'll remember things about them, too, moments from two decades ago when they knocked over the dessert table while reaching for the banana pudding (you know who you are), or when they went on vacation and left the front door open (note to self), or when they said to me and my husband and my babies: Come see us any time. We'd love to have you. Away this long from my identity and history as the daughter of a Southern family in a Southern town, I'll walk back into it, like putting on a coat that already has lip balm in the right pocket.

The French, you know, are famous for taking their vacations. C's colleagues have weeks and weeks of vacation every year, six or seven or eight. His office here will close, computers off, lights out, doors locked, for the span of the holidays. Taking vacations is serious business. Following the French method, I'll be closing up La Bastiole for a couple of weeks. I want my extended family to be able to relax around me and not worry that I'm going to write about them later that day (I'll wait a while, and change the names). But I'll be back, long about January 5. Whatever you celebrate between now and then--and I hope you do celebrate something, regardless of what you believe, even if you don't believe; it's dark and cold outside, and it's better to be inside in light and warmth, and better still in light and warmth with people you love and someone's family recipe for something--I hope you celebrate it well. We'll be marking Christmas and Hanukkah and New Year's, a lot of occasions, but then, we've a lot to celebrate, a lot to say thank you for.

And I'll be back in January. Come by any time.

Time

I listened to the church bells strike seven this morning and knew it was almost time to get out of bed. In a couple of minutes, they struck the hour again, and I threw back the comforter. When we first moved in to La Bastiole, we were puzzled by the church bell phenomenon. It was strange enough, we thought, that we could hear the village church striking the hour, every hour, every day; why, though, did we hear the hour struck twice? Seven strikes, or twelve, or two, two or three minutes, and then, seven or twelve or two strikes again.

For a week we were certain that we were hearing two different clocks. La Bastiole sits on a hillside below one village and along from another. Each village has a church with a tower, bien sûr, and so we decided that the two clocks were not quite synchronized. Then one day we walked up the hill to our village and heard the bells strike, then, turning back towards home, we heard the same hour struck but from the opposite direction. The sounds were distant enough from each other that we realized that we could not be hearing both clocks from our house.

That left one explanation: the same tower was striking the hour twice. Seven o'clock; two minutes; seven o'clock again. It suggests a different notion of time, n'est pas? C is forever setting all of our clocks, watches, computers, ovens, telephones to the atomic clock, or Greenwich, or some international official this is what time it really is clock. He will wait until the second hand is at 59 and then ease the minute hand over, and then give a satisfied nod: one piece of the universe controlled. We come from people who are terminally punctual. They arrive on time. Our lives in America were punctual lives. Five minutes earlier or later was the difference between sitting an extra half hour in traffic.

So the matter of seven o'clock happening twice was mind-bending. It can only be seven o'clock once. Which time is correct? If you miss the first chiming, then won't your hour end up with only 58 minutes in it? While I find that my hours often have more or less than the standard 60 minutes, I did find it puzzling that the clock should strike the hour twice. And it wasn't just the clock we could hear: I found that in other villages the church clocks did the same thing.

I asked Olivier. At first, he looked confused at my question. Pourquoi les cloches sonnent-elles deux fois? Why do the church bells strike twice? He looked a little suspicious, like I might be trying to trick him with this silly question. Then he remembered that my French wasn't that good. In his best imitation of Yves Montand, he raised his eyebrows and shrugged. C'est comme ça, he said. It's like that.

I've never gotten another answer, and I've asked the question many times. I don't wonder about it so much any more. These days, when I hear the bells chime, I sometimes forget to count all the way to the end. Then I wait until they sound again, and start over. It's about nine o'clock. Time to think about taking a walk.